


Stars on Ceiling Walls

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo
Genre: Apocalypse, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-10
Updated: 2006-08-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:22:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Utopia, noun: a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stars on Ceiling Walls

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the first book only. Warnings for character death on a mass global scale and also implied child abuse on the same level as the book. You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/34680.html).

-

The newspaper came every single day without fail at exactly 4:14 in the afternoon, except the Sunday edition, which came at 9:10 in the morning, at which time Leven Thumps had his head buried under his pillow so as to better keep it from throbbing right off his neck with the force of his hangover.

At 4:00, every single day without fail, he would go outside to hose down the lemon basil he had growing along the walk that led up the perfect walk to his porch. On Mondays, he would spray too hard and all the plants would list to one side for the rest of the week.

At 4:14, an empty-eyed boy on a bicycle would turn onto his circle drive, and he would put his hose down and take the newspaper from him, and walk up his perfect, basil-lined walk to his porch and through the impeccably white front door and into his impeccably perfect, rarely-used living room with his hard wood floors and his velvet-lined, deep dish couches, and he would sit in the armchair in front of the dusty, ornate fireplace and read.

At 4:45, he would get up and head into his chrome kitchen that looked like the Tin Man's paradise and fetch a pair of scissors, and he would spread the paper over the dining table on the terrace that overlooked the swimming pool in his backyard, and further beyond that, the most spectacular view of the California coast.

He would cut out half a dozen articles out of almost every newspaper, and walk up the stairs with pictures on the walls of children who had never wanted to sit still for the photos that were immortalized there, in frames too big for the tiny beings he had never known.

At 5:00 every single day, he would have the articles push-pinned into the walls of his bedroom.

Over the years, his bedroom had become completely covered in evidence. It was the only room in his entire house that looked like it had been lived in, the only room that suffered any change when he moved into it after Sabine destroyed Foo and the world fell apart at the seams.

Well, that wasn't true. The room next to his had been lived in.

 

-

 

_"Keep going," Winter told him, twisting her head to look over her shoulder at the traffic behind them, white-blonde hair flowing over and around her face, the scraggly ends flapping in the wind. "And go faster. They're after us."_

_"They always will be," Leven whispered, the words snatched out of his mouth and left hanging by the sign they just passed that read, "Welcome to California."_

_He looked over at her, at her cracked lips and her sunburned, peeling nose, and remembered the look on her face when he had put his foot down and point-blank refused to get himself mixed up into the whole Foo business. He had thought it would be Clover or Geth who would be hurt the most, and so he had looked at her when he said it, and the look of betrayal on her face was like being sucker-punched in the stomach._

_"Why did you come with me?" he yelled over the sound of a horn blaring as they whipped around a massive semi, speedometer jumping up to 90. It was probably the fourth or fifth time he had asked the question since she had shown up in his trailer park on his seventeenth birthday in her stolen convertible and her beautiful evergreen eyes that made him forget he had ever been a failure._

_Her answer was always the same. "It was only when I'm with you that I feel like I'm living."_

 

-

 

They never talked about what happened between the day he went home to his furious uncle and woke up in the emergency room, and the day he got behind the wheel of her convertible and left Oklahoma to be devoured by shadow.

They were a boy and a girl with no money, but that didn't matter anymore. People and places were disappearing faster than floppy hats at a garage sale, and when they found a house on the beach where Sabine's shadows had already devoured the homeowners, there was nobody left who was going to stop them from moving in.

She had slept in the bedroom next to his for the first few days, but it didn't last long.

 

-

 

_The sound of the ocean outside his window, rushing in and out, masked the sound of her breathing._

_He let out the most undignified scream when he opened his eyes and found her bending over him, face pale and drawn._

_"I am dying, Lev," she whispered, and, if anything, his heart rate just picked up further. He sat up, fast, sheets with too-high thread count pooling around his waist and leaving his chest bare for the cool California night air wafting in from the open bay window._

_"What? How?"_

_"Foo is dying," she told him, folding one leg under her as she sat on the edge of his bed. In full profile of the moonlight, he could tell that she was thin to the point of skeletal, and it could have just been his sleep-blurred vision, but she looked almost ... translucent in places. "Earth is dying. Since I'm a nit, I'll just die with them."_

_"If Sabine doesn't find us first."_

_"Yes," she said, and then her arms were snaking around his neck and her head was on his chest, and there was a moment of awkwardness when they tried to figure out what to do with their legs, but soon they were curled around each other in a bed that wasn't theirs in a house that belonged to the dead._

 

-

 

She never went back to her room. They just let it stay like that, just like they never removed the influences of the family that had lived and loved there before them, the family who had died for no other reason than their dreams weren't dark enough.

There were vitamins lined up next to the kitchen sink with everyone's names printed on the top of the bottles in clear, lime green Sharpie. Behind the pool, there was a little cemetery for all the pets, including what Leven and Winter assumed were some twenty plus goldfish. There was a set of nunchucks on the black leather couch in the downstairs parlor and a little pink tutu hanging from the doorknob to the laundry room.

They never bothered to move these things.

They just lived their days doing nothing. It was an art both of them had perfected in the three years that had passed since they were told they had to save the world, and the only person who was going to help them was a toothpick.

Winter would sit outside and swish her legs through the murky pool water, watching the ocean breathe. Occasionally there'd be another person, a refugee like her, or someone who actually lived along in here desperate to continue living. Sometimes, she would wave. Other times, she would get up and go indoors and cry. Leven would sit on the black leather sofa in the downstairs parlor next to the nunchucks and flip through the two hundred odd channels. Most of them were nothing but grey fuzz; there were just too few people left to run that many TV stations. And what channels there were were mostly news, and there was no news he wanted to hear anymore.

At 4:14 exactly, a scared-looking boy on a bicycle would bring them the newspaper.

Winter would throw out the remains of the paper when he was done cutting it up, then she would sit next to Leven and talk to him. She would tell him of all the memories she had of Foo. She would tell him about the nits and the rants and the cogs, and even of the wisps and the Council of Wonder and the Want. She would tell him about the forests and the lakes and the endless possibilities, of the whining candy and the conversational walls and the division of people.

 

-

 

_"They just want peace," she murmured, her green eyes sad and beautiful. "That's all the ever wanted. Peace."_

 

-

 

She would talk to him about everything he was supposed to save and didn't.

As a rule, they never mentioned those three years. She told him about Foo, but she never mentioned going to Germany and failing to stop Sabine from taking over the gateway, of being slandered by her friends for being the one who let Geth die. He, in return, tells her about Oklahoma, what little there is, but he never mentions that the scars on his face weren't caused by a car accident when he was fourteen like he told everyone else, but by his uncle armed with his mother's half-sister's curling iron.

At night, they curl up in Leven's bed and listen to the sea, endless and independent.

They never dreamed.

Winter died about six months later. He buried her in the cemetery with the goldfish.

The world struggled on.

And still the newspaper arrived every single day without fail at 4:14 in the afternoon.

Still Leven cut out the articles of the horrible things happening as the world fell apart at the seams because he had refused to save it. Still he found the liqueur cabinet and steadily worked his way through it as the population of the world continued to plummet all around him, and when he had emptied that he turned to the cooking sherry and the margarita mixes from the Tin Man's kitchen.

He was twenty before Sabine's shadows found him, surrounded by the fluttering slips of paper and the memories of a family he didn't know. His hair was long and unkempt, the white streak a shock against the brown. He was too thin for his clothes. Winter's imprint was still clear in the unwashed bedsheets next to him.

He spread his arms to them as they swarmed the room, hissing and spitting and smiling. His eyes were as black as coal. The last traces of gold had vanished from them the day Winter abandoned everything to run away with him.

"What do you think you can do to me?" he asked them, and laughed.

The next day, when the empty-eyed paper boy pulled into the circle drive of the Utopia Gated Living Community at approximately 4:14, there was nobody waiting for him.

 

-  
fin


End file.
